Watch How Humans Conquered the World in 200,000 Years

Humans, in our current evolved forms, have been around on Earth for about 200,000 years or so, a relative drop in the bucket when compared to the dozens of billions of years on the galactic calendar. But despite our insignificance on any sprawled out timeline, our species' ability to conquer to world is completely unprecedented, and when its sprawled out before you—spanning millennia in just mere minutes—the results are fascinating if not a bit scary.

The American Museum of Natural History did precisely that, charting humanity's population over our entire 200,000-year-old lifetime. The short 6-minute animation also makes note of huge events and empires in human history to help provide context for certain population bursts.

For 99 percent of our history, thing are relatively stable with a small creep in population over time. It isn't until the twentieth century that everything changes.

As the video mentions, "it took 200,000 years for our population to reach 1 billion, and only 200 years to reach 7 billion." That's a lot of people. Let's hope our planet can handle it.

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